Korg MS Series - Automated Changes

YouTube via Newueel — May 11, 2010 — "This video is actually about lazy synthesizing. All changes and variations are controlled by the analog setup itself! This means that after pressing the SQ-10 START button, the machines are not touched anymore, which gave me some time to freak out with the camera ;). The audio is recorded in one take, no FX and no edits.

Here's a description of the 2 most interesting automated changes:

The tonics (bass and melody) change after each random number of loops. Note that tonic changes only happen at the first step of a sequence. This is a trick using two S&H modules. Basically SQ-10 Channel C holds 12 predefined keynotes (including duplicates). The channel C output voltage is sampled and hold with a slow interval using the MG. The clock interval is greater than 1 sequence. Since the MG is not synced with the SQ-10 clock speed, this results in a random changing tonic, but most of the times in the middle of a sequence. Therefore another S&H module samples the output of the first S&H module every first step of a sequence and holds it for the rest of the sequence. This way each tonic change is delayed until the next first step of a sequence. Sometimes there seems to be no tonic, this is because one of the predefined tonics has an inaudible frequency.

When listening to the melody, note that it is continuously varying. Sometimes you hear the full melody, but most of the the time notes are skipped at random. This is due to the so called probability patch. The probability controls the chance for a step that it's being played (or muted) and can be fully controlled from 0% to 100%. This creates interesting variations since not all notes are necessarily played all times. In this patch the probability is changing continuously between 50% and 100%. This way the melody is continuously varying."